Leo Graetz was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 physicist

Physicist

A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...

. He was born in Wrocław (Breslau), Poland

Poland

Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...

 as the son of the historian Heinrich Graetz

Heinrich Graetz

Heinrich Graetz was amongst the first historians to write a comprehensive history of the Jewish people from a Jewish perspective....

.

Graetz was one of the first to investigate the propagation of electromagnetic energy

Electromagnetic radiation

Electromagnetic radiation is a form of energy that exhibits wave-like behavior as it travels through space...

. The Graetz number (Gz), a dimensionless number describing heat flow

Heat transfer

Heat transfer is a discipline of thermal engineering that concerns the exchange of thermal energy from one physical system to another. Heat transfer is classified into various mechanisms, such as heat conduction, convection, thermal radiation, and phase-change transfer...

, is named after him, as is the diode bridge

Diode bridge

A diode bridge is an arrangement of four diodes in a bridge circuit configuration that provides the same polarity of output for either polarity of input. When used in its most common application, for conversion of an alternating current input into direct current a output, it is known as a...

 rectifier circuit he invented.

In 1880 he confirmed the Stefan–Boltzmann law.

Graetz died in Munich

Munich

Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...

at age 85.

Publications

• Die Elektrizität und ihre Anwendungen (Electricity and Its Applications), Stuttgart 1903
• Handbuch der Elektrizität und des Magnetismus (Handbook of Electricity and Magnetism) - 5 volumes, 1918, 1921, 1923, 1920, 1928
• Recent developments in atomic theory, 1922